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Journal; Membership Has Its Privileges

You can understand the young George W. Bush wanting to dodge Vietnam, as he did by joining the Texas Air National Guard, a k a the Champagne Unit. But what does it say that the middle-aged Mr. Bush was scared to go to Boston?

Among the lame excuses the Bush campaign offered for its man's doomed effort to duck presidential debates was that one would take place adjacent to the John F. Kennedy Library. By this logic, Democrats should be able to veto any debate in the vicinity of Reagan National Airport, let alone the Lincoln Tunnel.

As you read this, Mr. Bush is negotiating the terms of his surrender to the inevitable -- he always folds in the end. But the weeklong debate about debates has already told us more about him than we may learn in any subsequent face-offs with Al Gore over prescription drug plans. Mr. Bush's behavior this week is not an anomaly in either his personal or political histories, but a ringing affirmation of both.

The man has always ducked debates. In the primaries this year he pulled the same stunt on John McCain that he did on Mr. Gore -- initially turning down a California debate invitation, then abruptly accepting it once he thought Mr. McCain might not be able to appear. When Mr. Bush ran against Ann Richards for Texas governor in '94, his campaign turned down a debate invitation from ''Larry King Live,'' saying it was an unfair venue -- the flip side of this year's charade, when Mr. King's show was deemed an ideal forum by Mr. Bush because it suited his shell game. Even in his '98 re-election race, against a weak opponent nearly 50 points behind in the polls, Mr. Bush was a debate dodger. As Bill Minutaglio writes in his authoritative biography, ''First Son,'' the Bush people made sure the single debate was held in remote El Paso, ''the hardest city to get to in Texas,'' that it was moderated by one provincial reporter, that all tough journalists were banned from the TV studio, and that it was ''held on a Friday night in the middle of high school football season.''

It's never bothered me that Mr. Bush couldn't pass a pop quiz on the names of the leaders of Chechnya, Taiwan, India and Pakistan, but imagine if in a crisis he had to face these leaders in high-stakes negotiations -- or debate them in the media court of world opinion. A guy who at one point ducked verbal fisticuffs with Steve Forbes and Gary Bauer, and even argued for weeks over the format by which he'd break bread with a few gay Republicans, doesn't exactly inspire confidence in any High Noon showdown.

The standard rap on Mr. Bush's debate phobia is that he's a lightweight who doesn't do his homework and is fearful of falling into malapropisms. But the real issue is more of character than intelligence. The character he has confirmed in the debate about debates is twofold: that of an entitled, spoiled brat who wants to play by his own rules or else take his feather pillow and go home, and that of a man who wants to avoid confrontation at almost any cost.

Mr. Bush's sense of entitlement was woven into his debate strategy: he assumed every American could afford cable to watch CNN; he assumed NBC's ''Meet the Press'' would give him prime-time air if he showed up without Mr. Gore. And why shouldn't he make these assumptions? As many have chronicled, his name and family connections have always opened doors for him -- from his admissions to Andover and Yale to his sponsorship in the oil business to his participation (with relatively piddling capital) in the sweetheart partnership that bought and then sold the Texas Rangers for an eye-popping profit. There's nothing illegal or immoral about this, but, like Mr. Bush's decision to opt for the National Guard over enlisting in the Air Force (or being drafted) during Vietnam, the pattern reveals a risk-averse, as well as a charmed, life. Whatever the opposite of battle-tested is, that's George W. Bush. (Brave fraternity pranks don't count.)

''He'll come to the presidency with a lighter resume than anybody has in at least a hundred years,'' wrote Nicholas Lemann in his New Yorker profile of the governor, noting that even 20th-century presidents-come-lately like Warren Harding and John Kennedy had previously served in public office 21 and 14 years respectively next to Mr. Bush's 6. Or as Ron Reagan Jr. scoffed less charitably to Lloyd Grove of The Washington Post last month, ''What is [Mr. Bush's] accomplishment? That he's no longer an obnoxious drunk?''

Yet even the fabled personal milestones of Mr. Bush's biography -- the private sins and contretemps that are supposed to have imbued him with the hard knocks and rough edges missing from his bland resume -- wilt under close scrutiny. Much has been made, for instance, of Mr. Bush's swearing off alcohol at age 40 while partying at the Broadmoor resort in Colorado; media hagiographers have inflated this exertion of will and spiritual forbearance into a profile in courage equivalent to wartime derring-do. (So much so that last week Matt Drudge tried to drum up a scandal by publicizing a 1992 wedding video allegedly depicting the governor falling off the wagon.)

But by Mr. Bush's own account -- which is supported by neutral witnesses -- he was never a clinical alcoholic, never drank during the day (or every day), never needed to seek out A.A. or any other treatment. In other words, he was just an occasionally out-of-control country-club drinker who quit cold turkey after a bad hangover -- a far cry from those who face the far harsher challenge of conquering the crippling disease of alcoholism.

It also turns out -- according to recent reportage by The Times's Nicholas Kristof -- that the one fearless confrontation in Mr. Bush's professional past is also inflated: He did not, as legend has it, fire John Sununu from his father's administration but only gave Mr. Sununu a stiff talking-to in the days before his departure. It's enough to make you wonder if all those fruitless rumors about Mr. Bush's alleged cocaine use were not floated by Bush enemies after all, but by his allies -- just to give him an aura of true grit. As far as I can discern, the only really daring move in Mr. Bush's entire life was to fire Bobby Valentine as manager of the Texas Rangers -- though Mr. Valentine has said that his dismissal took the form of an hourlong love tap rather than a boot administered by a decisive leader.

All of which suggests that Mr. Bush is a nice guy -- which thus explains why his greatest successes have been as a cheerleader. He was not only head cheerleader at Andover, but both in oil and in baseball served the same function: he was the glad-handing salesman, the schmoozer, the p.r. front man who hit up investors for money and roused the fans while other executives actually made the crucial business decisions and ran the companies. For that matter, the less-than-powerful job of Texas governor has also been described as ''a cheerleader and p.r. person'' by Paul Rea, a Texas oil business pal of Mr. Bush's.

A cheerleader or p.r. person, by definition, does not want to get into debates or risk angry confrontations with anyone. That's why Mr. Bush's juvenile wisecrack this week about The Times's Adam Clymer was completely in character. Though Mr. Bush and his campaign tried to spin the incident as an example of Trumanesque plain speaking, Truman would have confronted Mr. Clymer as directly as he famously did The Washington Post's Paul Hume rather than do so accidentally by stupidly speaking into an open mike.

Is a professional cheerleader the kind of leader we want as president? In this untroubled time, maybe so. The debate debate behind him, a resurgently upbeat Mr. Bush vowed on Thursday that he would be nicer than ever and start campaigning more with ''real people'' in such real places as coffee shops and cafeterias. I assume by ''real people'' he means those of us who haven't had his easeful career path, who aren't given a free pass when we dodge our battles, who have had crises in life greater than one too many at the Broadmoor. To prove how compassionately he feels toward us all, Mr. Bush has of late taken to symbolizing his tax cut by handing out dollar bills. This gesture, too, is a striking revelation of character: here is a guy whose entire biography testifies to the unassailable proposition that money talks.